BallinEurope, the European Basketball news site

Episode #34 of the BallinEurope/heinnews co-produced “Talking the Charge” podcast series is now available online and is downloadable from iTunes.

With the Euroleague Final Four overshadowing all else in Continental hoops this week, Dave Hein and yours truly were naturally set to chat up the big tournament – after BiE tees off on a sports-related pet peeve (Hint: Go Washington Redtails!), that is.

Just skip the first 10 minutes of the ‘cast if you’re not particularly enamored with American football, as Britain-based John Hobbs of TalkBasket.net discusses the impact (if any) this tournament will have on the British sports landscape. Plus, he offers his take on the CSKA Moscow-Olympiacos match happening tomorrow and BiE is forced once again to defend his choice for 2013 Euroleague MVP.

All this plus a review of one of the best worst basketball movies BiE’s ever seen (and that’s saying something), the hilariously-entitled Michael Jordan: An American Hero.

Check out the entire podcast here or to subscribe from this episode ad infinitum, enter http://heinnews.com/feed/taking-the-charge/ into iTunes or any podcast aggregator.

Thanks for listening and talk to you next week!

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So your Euroleague bracket got busted at some point during the quarterfinal round — No problem! BallinEurope offers a shot at prognosticatory redemption today. We want to know: What’s your prediction for the 2013 Euroleague championship game?

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BallinEurope is sorry that CSKA Moscow and Olympiacos, finalists of that memorable 2012 Euroleague Final Four (one of this association’s best tournaments ever – and readers know just how much BiE hates sports-historical hyperbole) won’t get to repeat their matchup in the climactic game again this year, but at least we get a heckuva revenge game on Thursday.

Once again, Olympiacos goes in as underdog of both this match and to take the tourney – but this out, media members (by which BiE means an overwhelming majority, including BiE) won’t be expecting a bunch of overachievers to be steamrolled by squads apparently more talented on paper. Doesn’t it still seem like the factors are all in Moscow’s favor, though? Here are BiE’s five key questions going into the London grudge match…

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Right, so let’s get a week’s worth of Euroleague hype started the democratic, opinionatin’ way. BallinEurope wants to know: Who do you have winning in the first pair of games and advancing to the championship?

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BallinEurope tries to take the responsibilities of Euroleague media partnership seriously and so spent way too much time deliberating over the vote for this season’s all-Euroeleague team/MVP awards. Having been given through last Friday – and after the result of the Olympiacos-Anadolu Efes game was in – to fill out the ballot, let’s just say BiE stayed up late determining just the right order for submission. One can’t take this stuff too seriously, can one?

Of course, every year, the thoughtful media member must first define “Most Valuable Player” Should this title be taken to mean simply the best player within the given association for the given year? Or perhaps the value of Player X to his *team*, i.e. consideration of how much worse X’s squad would have been without him, is most important – though this contention relies on speculation rather than the fact of accumulated stats.

Questions upon questions: What about the defensive contributions which elude statistical measure? Or those intangibles of leadership that a cagey veteran like Vassilis Spanoulis (or Sarunas Jasikevicius, for seven-minute bursts, for that matter) adds to a successful side? And on this note – How much emphasis and importance should be placed on participation with a winning team? The All-Euroleague first team these days has tended to include five players from Top Four teams, rewarding winning with an individual nod. But wasn’t someone having enough of a banner year to get a Montepaschi Siena or Caja Laboral Baskonia much further into the EL season than expected?

You see the can of worms BiE had opened; it’s like this every year.

Regardless, BiE’s ballot is in and after a subsequent weekend of watching more hoops, an examination of the thinking process. The Euroleague ballot is set in the now-fairly standard format: Media partners may vote for five players, with five points awarded to each voter’s no. 1 choice, four to the no. 2, three to the no. 3, etc. Once again, the ‘League is allowing free voting: Any five players regardless of position may be chosen. (At least that part was easy…)

So here’s how BiE’s ballot looked. Continue Reading…

Episode #30 of the BallinEurope/heinnews weekly podcast Taking The Charge is now available online and on iTunes.

David Hein and BiE are joined this week by Ben Golliver of SI.com and Blazers Edge; based in Portland, Ben was lucky enough to have attending the 2013 Nike Hoop Summit live and so much time is spent discussing prospects and performance of Livio Jean-Charles, Andrew Wiggins, Dennis Schroder and the rest of the top-quality youth players from that game. (The match in its entirety is still available on YouTube and is embedded directly below.)

Golliver also shares some thoughts on the NBA’s first seasons with “flopping” rules in the books; it seems the man has become something of the expert on the move over there at SI.com, ultimately culminating in the wonderful Floppies awards ranking the 10 most ridiculous dives of the season over there.

Also on our collective mind of course are this week’s Euroleague quarterfinal games five; while Semih Erden and Jamon Lucas were heroic in two Anadolu Efes wins, can the Turkish side continue to neutralize Vassilis Spanoulis’ playmaking ability? And can FC Barcelona produce enough points (like, more than 70) to top the masterful Panathinaikos half-court D?

Finally, our tenuously-related sports movie review of the week focuses on the 1988 cult classic They Live starring professional wrestling all-time great Roddy Piper – one of the great flicks about the Reagan era 80s in America, except with great throwaway lines and comic-book hilarity.

Check out the entire podcast here or to subscribe from this episode ad infinitum, enter http://heinnews.com/feed/taking-the-charge/ into iTunes or any podcast aggregator.

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Now that BallinEurope has posted this website’s Official Euroleague Bracket as well as the only truly unassailable set of predictions, BiE takes stock of a little EL Bracketology from good ol’ Twitter. What sort of conclusions may be drawn from a sample size of 30 tweets (well, 29 plus Sannti’s) hashtagged with #ELbracket? Well…

The clear popular favorites within the sample to win their quarterfinals series are CSKA Moscow (with 93% of tweets liking the Red Army), FC Barcelona and Olympiacos (each with 77% of the “vote”). Surely to no one’s surprise, fandom was divided on the Real Madrid-Maccabi matchup, with Los Blancos liked 19-11 among our group.

Of the 16 possible finals matchups, seven combinations were covered. Again unsurprising was the fact that no one was gutsy enough to gamble on Anadolu Efes Pilsen getting so far, but two brackets with Caja Laboral Baskonia hoisting the trophy were found – and after the way these guys have squeaked in to advance twice this season, who can truly scoff? A final outcome of CSKA defeating Barca was chosen by nearly 33% of those who picked a tournament winner, and 60% predicted CSKA for 2013 Euroleague champions.

And some of BallinEurope’s favorite brackets were…

● In the category of “Best Presentation of a Euroleague Bracket” which BiE just made up, the winner is JovicaTasevski. Future bracketcrafters, this is your standard.

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From the ever-busy Better Late Than Never Department, below runs BallinEurope’s Euroleague Bracket; it says here that CSKA Moscow avenges last season’s heartbreaking season-ender by besting Olympiacos in the Final Four round and grabbing the title that eluded them in 2012.

Bonus Official Fearless Prediction™: The final score of the championship game will be 72-60.

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You’d think that the, um, enthusiasm at times of Greek basketball fans – you know, stuff like this. And this. And this. And … you get the idea – would be daunting for players otherwise pretty much unaccustomed to such behavior. And if the prospect of flares hurtling down like rain isn’t scary enough, you’d figure actually being knifed might turn a player off entirely to basketball in Greece.

Michael Bramos, however, ain’t going nowhere.

In February, Bramos was playing in his first Greek Cup final, another clash between the country’s Red and Green superpowers. That game, as is all too infrequently the case in Panathinaikos-Olympiacos, was marred by violence which delayed the game for an hour. In the midst of the chaos, Bramos was hit by a thrown jackknife.

So when interviewed by David Hein for the latest “Taking the Charge” podcast, what did Bramos have to say about the incident and Greek fandom in general? “If it happens, it happens … and that’s just the way Greece is.” (For more insight from Bramos, click on the previous link to hear the full interview.)

Prospective import players to Greece, this is your model: Just concentrate on the game and shrug off those knife attacks. It is what it is.

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Episode no. 22 of the heinnews/BallinEurope co-produced podcast series Taking the Charge is now available online.

This time out, guesting on the show is Aris Barkis of the excellent basketball site Eurohoops.net. While the name indicates that ‘Hoops is not exclusively devoted to the Greek game, David Hein and yours truly nevertheless get Aris to explain a bit about the madness descending unto courtside in the recent Greek Cup finals.

Of particular importance in the interview is Aris’ reminder that such incidents are generally not indicative of Greek basketball fandom as a whole, and that perhaps what’s mostly needed at Olympiacos-Panathinaikos games is German-style security…

Reviewed in this episode in our “Sports Movie of the Week” section is the American/Australian post-apocalyptic sport cult classic The Blood of Heroes, alternatively Salute of the Jugger (1989). In this one, Rutger Hauer stomps about the Outback as a grizzled veteran in a fascinating bloodsport mutated from rugby/American football known only as “The Game.” In the tradition of sports movies, also aboard is a young upstart who sees the game as her (that’s right, her; the post-apocalyptic future generates all sorts of badasses) ticket out of a poor life and into superstardom.

BiE contends that not only is Blood of Heroes compelling, exciting stuff, this film is actually well more unique and insightful that at first glance; tons of elucidation on this matter in the ‘cast.

For this and plenty of banter on all topics basketball, check out the entire podcast here.

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